Personally, I find data recovery programs to be useless. The point is to protect your data so that you don't need data recovery programs in the first place, and doing this is not that hard if you take a few appropriate steps. Of course, I didn't always understand this. Like most people, I trusted in my computer, as if it were some kind of infallible magic box which could safe guard, in perfection and perpetuity, all of my data. The sad truth was that this was not the case.

The first few problems that I had were my own fault – a matter of not keeping accurate track of where my files were and of deleting them by mistake. Fortunately, Microsoft Windows itself has a data recovery program in the form of “undelete”. There is nothing sophisticated about this program – it is one of the most simple data recovery programs that exist. Simply put, Windows never actually erases your files, but instead marks them as “deleted”, and moves them to a special folder called the recycling bin. There they will stay unless you go in and delete them manually a second time, or Windows runs out of space and needs to erase those deleted files. This is a good backup for inexperienced users who might idiotically delete something that they actually need, but most problems require more serious data recovery programs.

The next time I had data loss was more serious, but it turned out that I didn't have to use data recovery programs at all. My hard drive was starting to go – quite suddenly as always happens – and I had to slave boot it to another hard drive. This means that you load the computer with another hard drive running the system, and then can extract your information off of your own hard disk, even if there is something wrong with it and it will not load. This requires no data recovery programs, because it is simply a matter of reading the disk as if it were a floppy disk or cd-rom. Unfortunately, if there is a really serious problem with the disk-drive hardware, data recovery programs won't help you. You won't be able to slave boot the disk at all, and it will be so physically damaged that there will be no way to get the information off of it except to send it to a data recovery lab.